It is a well documented and widely recognized fact that healthcare personnel and patients of a healthcare facility can help prevent hospital acquired infections (nosocomial infections) by sanitizing their hands on a more consistent and frequent basis.
Our mothers were right when they would say, “WASH YOUR HANDS!”. More than 150 years ago, a Hungarian physician, Dr. Iemaz Semmelweis, discovered that “childbed fever”, the infection that routinely killed women who had just given birth, was being spread by his colleagues' bacteria-laden hands.
In 1842, Dr. Daniel Layman presented a report to the Indiana State Medical Society which informed them of his uncommon practice of routinely washing hands before and after patient contacts, which he found greatly reduced infections and illnesses in patients—the doctors were astonished.
Yet, even today, according to research reported in The Annals of Internal Medicine, it was found that the lowest rates of hand washing compliance in a hospital were among the busy healthcare personnel in high-risk intensive care units.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 5 percent of the people admitted to hospitals, about 1.8 million patients, will acquire an infection there. Twenty thousand of them will die as a direct result, and hospital-acquired infection will contribute to the deaths of 70,000 more people, far more than the nearly 40,000 Americans who die of breast cancer each year.
The CDC estimates that the annual cost to treat nosocomial infection to be $4.5 billion. The problem is getting worse. Though hospital patient stays are shorter and less frequent than they were 20 years ago, today's patients are generally sicker and more vulnerable. As a result, in the last two decades the rate of hospital-acquired infection has risen 36 percent.
The reasons given on why healthcare workers do not wash their hands when required are lack of time, inaccessible sinks, rough paper towels and hands being chapped from excessive washing.
New and improved waterless alcohol based hand sanitizers have provided more convenience to a healthcare worker to clean their hands more frequently.
Products such as GOJO Industries, Inc., Akron, Ohio; Purell® brand and Ecolab, Inc., St. Paul, Minn., Cida-Rinse® Gel brand represent some of these types of waterless alcohol based hand sanitizers.
Patients within a healthcare facility often acquire an infection (nosocomial infection) by coming in contact with people and/or item surfaces that contain harmful transient bacteria and viruses. Many possible cross-contamination elements exist within the patients' environment. In most healthcare facilities more than one (1) patient occupies a “patient room”. In such situations, patients share many items within a patient room such as: phone, TV remote, bathroom, bed divider, wheel chair, walker, water pitcher, food menu card, hand cleaning soap dispenser, etc. Additionally, patients also have numerous hand contacts with visitors such as relatives and friends and with nurses, doctors, technicians, etc., all of which represent potential sources for contraction of transient types of harmful bacteria and viruses.
Patients will sometimes inadvertently and unknowingly make hand contact with their own bandages, dressings, IV sites, etc. with contaminated hands. Patients in a healthcare facility often have an illness that has compromised their immune system making them more susceptible to transient forms of bacteria and viruses.
Patients of a healthcare facility have few resources to properly keep their hands clean. A patient can wash their hands in a room sink or bathroom sink. This of course requires the patient to move from a location or position like a bed or wheel chair to do so. Many patients are not capable of such movement. In many cases a healthcare worker will sometimes carry to a non-mobile patient a portable wash tray for personal hand cleaning. This procedure can burden the healthcare worker who has many important responsibilities to perform for many patients.
As described in the foregoing, there are many areas within a hospital environment that require consistent hand cleaning by healthcare personnel and patients. Administrative healthcare personnel frequently establish hand-cleaning guidelines for these different hospital areas, which require that healthcare workers and patients follow certain hand cleaning protocols. Compliance performance of the protocols is essentially monitored and measured through observation techniques, which sometimes results in costly non-representative and/or inaccurate data. The different hospital departments and the level of patient healthcare provided by each department vary greatly. Departments such as intensive care and critical care require more patient contacts by healthcare workers than the patients in the general recovery and rehabilitation departments. The different levels of patient care require different levels and standards to achieve hand-cleaning compliance. Regardless of the differences in hand cleaning protocols and the compliance standards, hospital administrators need a system that can provide uniformity in the hand cleaning activity throughout the hospital facility and a means to measure the performance of the healthcare personnel and patients that perform hand-cleaning operations. My invention and the novelties it incorporates provides a network system of hand cleaning dispensers operated with uniform procedures that can be used by healthcare workers and patients regardless of the department or level of care provided, and a compliance monitoring/measurement system that produces the hand cleaning event data the hospital administrators require to manage the programs to reduce nosocomial infections.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,683,012, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,927,548 issued to James Vellaveces on Nov. 4, 1997 and Jul. 27, 1999, respectively, disclose a novel, body-worn dispenser for alcohol-glycerin disinfectant gel that doctors and nurses can use to disinfect their hands before and after patient contacts. Said device as describe in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,683,012 and 5,927,548 could be easily used by patients to encourage routine hand disinfection and also prevent the likelihood of microbial cross-contamination by its single person use, but again U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,683,012 and 5,927,548 do not disclose any means to monitor, track or record the usage dose applications of the disinfecting gel dispenser nor do U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,683,012 and 5,927,548 disclose any means for its piston pump which can be variably actuated depending on the amount of pressure applied by the user's hand, to dispense exact dose applications of the disinfecting gel but only to describe its fluid output as a “small amount” from a bag type replaceable cartridge.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,194 issued to Keith Hippely on Dec. 19, 1995 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,986 issued to Laurens Last on Oct. 12, 1998 both describe personal, portable, and refillable fluid dispensers. U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,194 discloses an attachment means for a dispenser device to be worn on the body of the user. U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,986 describes a piston action pump to deliver an amount of fluid in the same manner as previously disclosed by the Vellaveces Patent. Neither U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,986 nor U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,194 disclose any method or apparatus to provide uniform unit dose applications of the fluid dispensed or methods to monitor, track, record and report usage information of a fluid dispenser.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,945,910 issued to William Gorra on Aug. 3, 1999 describes a method and apparatus for monitoring and reporting hand washing, U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,945 issued to Alan Applonie on Sep. 23, 1999 also describes a self-monitoring hand sanitizing station. U.S. Pat. No. 5,202,666 discloses a method and apparatus for enhancing hygiene. The preceding three (3) patents identified, refer in general to a non-portable wash station that many people access to wash their hands. Each patent describes separate novel methods and apparatus to monitor, record and report various hand washing activity that occurs at a given wash station.
There is a substantial prior art that discloses refillable types of soap dispensers such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,492,247 that describes a fluid reservoir that is replaceable from a rigidly mounted dispenser utilized by many users. U.S. Pat. No. 4,722,372 further describes a dispenser for multiple user access with a disposable fluid reservoir.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,226,462 discloses a unique method and apparatus to accurately introduce measured amounts of liquid into receptacles. Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 4,135,561 describes a similar method and apparatus for filling vials in an automated system.
There is also substantial prior art relating to the refilling of ink cartridges of printing apparatus. U.S. Pat. No. 6,022,102 describes a novel method to automatically refill a printer's ink cartridge when empty. Although there is a considerable amount of patents issued for automatically refilling apparatus and methods, I am not aware of any prior art which directly relates to refilling a hand-held, hand-operated, personal and portable fluid dispenser that upon its refilling process the amount of fluid used to refill said dispenser is recorded as to determine how much fluid was used over a certain time frame by a specific dispenser and by a specific user.
I am not aware of any prior art which discloses a method or apparatus that, in a system, monitors, tracks, records and reports the individual usage of a personal cleaning agent dispenser.